Disclosed herein is a method for managing the triboelectric charge of a two-component xerographic developer over a wide range of variables.
Because of the large number of variables surrounding xerographic printers, such as environmental conditions, job stresses, material variabilities, and the like, it is difficult to engineer a xerographic material with respect to tribo electric properties that remains optimum through all variables. As a result, xerographic latitude suffers.
The development health of a xerographic system is directly related to cases in which the triboelectric charge of the system is too high or too low. These instances happen because tribo charging is very much dependent on environmental conditions such as the grains of moisture in the air, the printing job such as low area versus high area coverage printing, and even carrier and toner manufacturing variations. When these variables are in play, xerographic printing can suffer from latitude constraints which limit where the printer can operate and the jobs the printer can print. Even with the limitations, the print quality often degrades as well.
Current methods of managing tribo electric charge within a machine generally entail manipulating the toner concentration (TC) by adding toner. There are, however, limitations. Too low of a TC can lead to supply constraints and too much TC can lead to saturated carrier and poor charging toner.
A method for managing developer health that enables printing performance over a wide range of uncontrolled variables, such as relative humidity, temperature, developer age, print job types, printer consumables variations and the like. Such a method can, in some embodiments, enable the ability to vary different settings on the printer under a wide variety of conditions, enabling greater system latitude. It can also provide opportunities to remove expensive environmental control units for temperature and humidity. Further, the ability to adjust tribo electric charge can allow for mitigation of difficulties such as pollution of the development wires in hybrid scavengeless development (HSD) type development systems, high Vmag, image line variation, image background defects, random clusters of toner particles known as “spits” that are transferred from the photoconductive belt to the copy sheet, light solid image areas, loose toner contamination within the printer, and the like.